Jeremy Paxman ridiculed over white middle-class male victim claim

Jeremy Paxman, the BBC Newsnight presenter, has been ridiculed for claiming that white middle-class men working face the worst levels of discrimination of anyone working in television.

Paxman under fire over his 'white middle-class male' television claims.Photo: PAUL GROVER

By Stephen Adams

2:25PM BST 26 Aug 2008

Krishnan Guru-Murthy, the Channel 4 News presenter, said: "I feel awfully sorry for white, middle-class men who went to Oxbridge... but I'm not sure they are the ones at the greatest disadvantage."

Paxman had told an audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival that in today's world being a white middle-class man in television was "the worst thing you can be".

He said he advised all such men who demonstrated a wish to work in television to "give up all hope".

Privately educated Guru-Murthy responded: "Obviously, the people who really are facing the biggest struggle to make it into television are those from working-class backgrounds and people from ethnic minorities. If they are both working class and from an ethnic minority, they really are up against it."

Meanwhile Rod Liddle, the former editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, said that he "laughed so hard when I read Jeremy's cri de coeur that coffee shot out of my nose and all over the kitchen table."

Liddle lampooned Paxman for his attempt to portray white middle-class men as victims.

"It is clear - his name deserves to be written alongside other fearless campaigners for equality: Rosa Parkes, Emmeline Pankhurst, Jeremy Paxman," he said.

It is the latest in a string of eccentric outbursts by Paxman.

In January he wrote to Sir Stuart Rose, the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, complaining that its underwear no longer gave enough support.

And earlier this month he attacked the Scots poet Robert Burns for being "no more than a king of sentimental doggerel".

Liddle concluded: "He is a clever, likeable man and a fine interviewer, but he has seemed hell-bent, of late, in making himself appear quite ludicrous."